This 2024 Overseas Practice Engagement investigates Occupations (ocupações) in São Paulo, understanding them as radical spaces of possibility, arenas of different forms of futuring. In these spaces, the right to the city materialises beyond conventional notions of citizenship and property, reshaping the way people live together and engage in practices of communing, care and solidarity. Despite legal limitations and normative restrictions, people engage in a diversity of practices and strategies to establish a sense of belonging and stability. They engage in a struggle for better life and better future; a collective aspiration that is both spatialized and socialised. In this context, social movements such as the MSTC (Movimento dos Sem-Teto do Centro) create a unique shared political horizon that strengthens individual capacity toward shared futures.

Overall, the aim of the OPE is to develop an understanding of and support the work on the ground of urban social movements such as MSTC that fight for the right to the city in São Paulo, also building on an existing partnership between The Bartlett DPU and the FESPSP. The project’s main objective is to understand how practices of occupation have the potential to generate spaces of hope and care, that can deepen interconnectedness across marginalised groups, leveraging on diverse vulnerabilities, instead of creating competing needs, and promoting solidarity in contexts of shared precariousness. 

BUDD students have developed research reports that 1) document occupation practices through combining life stories with timelines, maps and diagrams that spatially historicise struggle, resistance and solidarity, 2) understand how solidarity networks mobilise resources through informal conversations, interviews and participatory activities and 3) curate a set of resources that support advocacy, awareness, capacity building, teaching and future research.